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Sunday, December 28, 2014

Anabolic Fast Food: Surf 'n' Turf v1

DISCLAIMER: This works for me and is the result of a few years of experimentation in both training and meal timing. Your milage not may, WILL ABSOLUTELY vary if you try this as written. Anyone who's not me should just use this as a loose reference point or friendly suggestions for whatever it is you're trying to do. If you have specific questions, post in the comments or Email Me!

I often get asked about what sort of food combinations, otherwise "meals" one can eat when eating high-fat/keto. Fair enough, it's definitely a daunting question, especially if the last time you did any sort of nutritional research was when fat, salt, butter, and the nitrite content of bacon were horrible things that would kill you multiple times over. Hint: they're not, they won't, and I'll try and clarify when necessary. Just remember...Fat Is Our Friend!

This is really what he's been trying to tell us all these years...

So welcome to the inaugural post of what I'm calling Anabolic Fast Food. Anabolic Fasting is the term I use to describe how I eat, but careful not to confuse it with Purium's Anabolic Fast, which is a super low calorie 7-Day fast weight loss Fast. In my case, the Fast refers to the fact that I follow a Leangains/IF-type pattern, though maybe a bit more...well, for lack of a better term, extreme. Traditionally, IF calls or a 12-16 hour fast window and the remainder as an eating window, I tend to fast until after my last training session for the day and cram all my eating into about a 2 hour space, including prep-time. If you think about it, it adds up to about a 20+ hour fast, and somehow this all works for me, including the hard fasted training part with no carb intake. Now, keep in mind that your mileage may vary with both meal and training timing, so definitely feel free to tweak. That said, here are a few other points to keep in mind:

I use the term keto and anabolic interchangeably. Herein, I'll just be using the term anabolic, in honor of Dr. DiPasquale's work.

I also use terms like fatty, fat-heavy, and fat-laden quite liberally. These are not negative descriptions! Remember, Fat (from natural sources, especially animals!!) Is Our Friend!

The goal of each of these meals is to favor fat and stay around 2500 calories. That means I don't necessarily count macros, but I tend to stack my meals with more fat-primary foods as opposed to lean proteins, as you'll see.

Yes, I eat the same meal every day of the week, so I'll only be posting these once a week.

Corollary to that, I only eat once a day, hence the term "Anabolic Fast," and hence why each meal seems huge-ish (relatively).

Even though intermittent fasting is meant for weight loss, Anabolic Fasting is not, in fact, I'm currently in a strength, mass, and performance phase. As I said earlier, tweak calories and timing for your purposes and training schedule.

Alright, now that we've gotten all the boring stuff out of the way, let's get to what really matters, FOOD! For Surf 'n' Turf v1, we'll have:

1.5 lb Tilapia (~880 calories)

1 lb uncured bacon (~630 calories)

4 oz smoked salmon (~160 calories)

4 oz garlic and herb goat cheese (~360 calories)

6 eggs (~420 calories)

garlic and green onions (for the eggs)

Yes, I will eat all of this, yes, it will be delicious, yes, you should too.

This comes to around 2450 calories, and could definitely be split up over a couple of meals. Actually, I usually eat the smoked salmon and goat cheese first, then the bacon a little later (which gives me all that awesome grease for the fish and the eggs), and then of course, the fish and the eggs. That's just me, I'm lazy and uncreative. One could conceivably combine this or other ingredients into a pretty wicked frittata and eat on that all day. I mean, ultimately, as long as it all gets eaten, it doesn't really matter, as long as you find something that works for you. So that's it for this episode of Anabolic Fast Food, tune in next Sunday and we'll see what I'm eating for the first week of 2015...